Last night, the missus & I got to attend the 3rd-to-last (pen-penultimate?) stop on Al's current tour, on the University of Missouri - Columbia campus.

The Drive: Columbia, MO, is about 2 hours away from St. Louis, but inexplicable traffic jams in the middle of nowhere added an extra hour to that. Thankfully the drive home was in the middle of the night, so there was no congestion.

The Dinner: We ate at Shakespeare's Pizza, a labyrinthine hangout just a block off of campus. I'd been there before (my little brother went to Mizzou), but my wife had not, & she was kinda overwhelmed by the floor layout & the paging system for orders.

The Venue: Jesse Auditorium is in the main administration building for some inexplicable reason. (It's a very large campus; you'd think the primary performance venue wouldn't be attached to the offices, but whatever.) Seating took forever, because they only had 1 door into the auditorium open, which caused a 20-minute delay in the start of the show. And the seats were pretty small, too.

The Opener: Al picked his friend & UHF co-star, comedian Emo Phillips, to open the tour. I had no idea what to expect; all I knew of Emo before last night was his slow, sleepy voice. But it was a great stand-up set!

The Headliner: Al & the band were in excellent form, despite certainly being tired at this, the 74th show of the tour. The focus was on more obscure selections, mostly originals, without the usual multimedia display & costume changes & choreography of a normal Weird Al show. This was advertised in advance & was the main appeal for me to go to this tour instead of just waiting for his next STL show.

Awesome, Capt. Glad you got to see him. I’ve seen Al twice in concert, and they were both excellent. It would have been cool to see him perform in a more low-key setting with more originals and such, like you saw.